It’s a New Year and time for a new challenge here on the blog. Last year was pretty successful on the cooking front as I, like so many people, found myself with a lot more time for cooking and was correspondingly more adventurous. I haven’t done any sort of breakdown on last year’s writing but I wrote slightly more entries on this blog than I did over at the film blog – though I suspect the entries over there are longer – so I reckon I can claim that it was closer to 50/50 than it has been in many a year. There were months when the only thing I felt able to write about was food, so in a very really sense the food and mental health elements lined up and helped with my overall state of mind, despite the pandemic.
Over the summer I tackled a cook-book that I loved cooking from before I became a vegetarian. I made an effort to rediscover it as a vegetarian and while some dishes were disappointing, it was in general a rousing success. (I would not have expected that at the start of that project that the new regular recipe I’d take away from it would be the savoury tart.) It certainly knocked me out of the pasta rut I’d be gradually working my way into over the last couple of years. So I decided that that would be the plan for this year on the blog, I want to try cooking a new recipe each month, and to try cooking with a new ingredient each month.
In the shorter term, I’m taking part in the #cookjan project over on twitter, which is all about resisting toxic diet culture and finding joy through food in this often grey and depressing month of the year. I didn’t intend that my first contribution to the challenge should be quite so apt, but I do feel like starting off with a bread and butter pudding made from leftover panettone – that also used up that previously mentioned mysterious tub of double cream – was really a statement of intent! It was also really tasty. (My only criticism of the recipe was the realisation half-way through that it contained no spices? I guess if you’re using leftover home-made panettone it’s probably already spiced, but mine was shop-bought and definitely needed the nutmeg I added liberally to it.) I’m not sure that the rest of my contributions to it will be quite so decadent, as my stated intention is to focus on using up leftovers and reducing food waste but I do intend to focus on the fun rather than the guilt element of that part too.
For my own future reference, it was this recipe and I made a few tweaks to the recipe, as I did not have a full panettone left, I scaled down the cream, sugar and eggs – ie I didn’t bother with the extra egg yolk. Also because it was a chocolate chip panettone I didn’t use fruit preserve, I just buttered the slices, however about half-way through the pour overs, I liberally sprinkled the whole thing with nutmeg. My scaled down version is probably enough to serve four rather than six, as long as I can resist going back for seconds… Also I note that the prep time for it, is the time it takes for my oven to pre-heat to 180C plus 25 minutes – ie the time it took the pie I had for main course to cook.
Cupboard Life 